


Perception Without Comprehension

by Papapaldi



Category: BioShock Infinite, Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Gen, I've connected the dots! I've connected them!, certified waffle about gods and magic and parallel universes, teen cribs and cosmic existential crises
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-10
Updated: 2021-02-09
Packaged: 2021-03-15 22:08:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,902
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29321409
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Papapaldi/pseuds/Papapaldi
Summary: There is a God above the water, and one below. Stars above, leviathans beneath. The science of the new age, and ancient magic encased in the black stone that sprouts upon the seafloor. They are antithetical, and parallel, and were brought into being by similar rites. A ritual, and an accident, both concerning blood.One of them is being born, forgetting what it was to live, while the other is dying, and is starting, in pain, to remember.
Relationships: Elizabeth (BioShock) & The Outsider (Dishonored)
Comments: 4
Kudos: 11





	Perception Without Comprehension

**Author's Note:**

> It's about the ocean imagery, ok. Liz has the stars and the lighthouses, but what lives in the ocean? Bam. Whales. It makes sense.  
> This is incoherent waffle.

The God above the water sees the world as an expanse of stars. They blink and flicker like bulbs because, if she gets close enough, they are. Traipsing along the paths of brine soaked wood and glistening stone that construct themselves beneath her feet as she walks across the sea, it is revealed; the stars are just the crowning rays of an infinitum of lighthouses. 

Sometimes the sea is not water, it is the rolling dunes of soft white sand, the empty void of space, an endless moon-white tundra. In these alternate configurations, the lighthouses are fortresses and observatories and space stations, but all of them are entrances. To cities, and to a new permutation of reality. Potentialities brim and beckon from behind every door, beneath every flickering star. She has yet to explore every permutation, and wonders if doing so is a mathematical impossibility. Infinite places to see during what may be an infinite life. She expects that her consciousness will fade into the excess of new memories and apathy that omnipotence creates, given time. The pinprick that was her moral existence sinking beneath the swap of infinity, like a droplet in the ocean that drifts, day and night, and crashes against the rocks at the base of so many lighthouses. 

It is halfway submerged already, but dimly she recalls the truth. A long time ago, and in mere moments past, her name was Elizabeth. 

Take all of it in – the stars and the lighthouses, the seas and variations thereupon, consider the paths between them, the doors and the worlds beyond them – and discard it. It is only a metaphor, conjured by a new God attempting to make sense of the enumerable chaos, and lay it bare before mortal eyes. She enjoys the metaphor. It reminds her of all the places she could not see, in her mortal life. The sights only glimpsed through half-open windows, tears rending stilted and grey across the flimsy surface of time. Now she can warp the null space into whatever form she likes, and the shapes and colours satisfy the once-human part of herself that remains so partial to sensations such as sight and touch and logical sense. 

Once, the God lived, as nothing in this in-between place ever has. She was born, flared into a short and lonely life, and died the moment her eyes were blown wide open by the searing white of an explosion, which broke her shackles and tore the skies. 

Before that, part of her was always out of place – a severed pinkie finger connected by a phantom strand, pulling at her from a place beyond time – but in that moment, with the gates torn open, all her shattered pieces were united. What happens when the blood of a child drifts through the space between worlds? It calls out, it lives, warm and red and screaming. It soaks into the fabric of reality, and is forever imbued in its celestial thread. What happens when a child is raised – or, rather, left to fend for themselves save the nights of harsh lamplight and sharp metal and electric bite that pass unremembered – in a permutation of the world that is not their own? The disconnect festers, formed in the child’s early years when her mind was still malleable. The disconnect manifests itself in tears. The initial rupture, like a fault line, spreads jagged across the glass in fractures and chasms and begins to crack entire worlds in two, from a thousand fissures living in simultaneous, parallel realities. But in all realities, a machine is constructed to stop the spread of dimensional destruction, and the strange sickness and visions it brings. 

In most of these realities, the child is kept imprisoned, in copper and in the metaphysical aspect of the machine that strangles her grasp upon reality and its many permutations. Her gifts, diluted, weaponised, are used to raise an army of twisted creatures – their minds dead and forms stretched between one world and the next – and fulfil the prophecies repeated with hope by the zealous masses for decades. 

A blossoming new age of science births one wicked war machine after the next, and she, straight-backed and broken-spirited, time-worn and tortured and old, sets her carnivalesque artillery upon the world below the city in the clouds, and watches it burn. This, the dominant course of events in the infinite sea, is the feeling that clings to her now, persistent and parasitic despite the slow fading of her mortal memory. The old woman who stands at the helm of a city long since broken to a sad, conniving place controlled by the monsters it spawned from the mouths of her laboratories. The old mother, who watches her children unleash their terror on the world below that has, in its years of separation, grown complacent in its shining technological age of plenty and splendor and sin, knowing that she has no power to stop it. Knowing that this is her destiny, carved in stone, painted across posters, printed in prayer books and repeated like a spell. This is her purpose, and it is unchangeable.

But as the bombs fall, and the creatures descend – mutated by grotesque elemental powers, and half-rotted, nightmarish automata – she laments at the power she is still able to sense, lurking so very close and yet impossibly far. It calls, the dominion that is, by blood, her right to hold. Not the city in the clouds, but the ocean, the sky, the lighthouses and their doors, behind which her worn eyes will never see. 

The world dies, in these permutations. Her city zips between the Atlantic clouds, metal plated and laden with powerful engines, camouflaged, weaponised, raining heavenly fire upon the swollen silver cities below. The Americans discount the urban legend of the missing 19th century carnival attraction that once consisted of just a few quaint buildings hovering over the World’s Fair. It is unrecognisable now. They suspect the Russians, and when the Soviets retaliate against the perceived attack, so follows a call and response consisting of a simple motif; a growing blast radius. Columbia’s attack is just the catalyst. The Sodom destroys itself. 

And so the world is cleansed, in radioactive fumes that burn flesh to the bone, and melt minds within their skulls. And so the world is dead, infernos, bombed back to the primordial age before life was dashed haphazardly upon the canvas. It will be a very long time, through ashen winter and firestorm and noxious spring, before the world can ever grow again. 

In these realities, she dies alone upon a throne of bodies, beside a family of broken children torn out and sewn into the fabric of reality, shambling, mad. The workers, who toiled in the bowels of her empire, every hope of rebellion quelled over so many decades, are joyous. The citizens, who were raised upon a diet of propaganda naming her saviour of the sinful earth, mourn her dutifully. The metal city in the clouds rejoices at the fate of the world, even as the fumes reach their altitudinous height, shielded in their domed enclosures high in the bitter chill. They rejoice, even as death comes to Utopia, and the people of Columbia choke upon the toxins they prayed would come for nearly a century. 

These realities have now been erased, and the city in the clouds does not exist. It has never existed nor will it ever exist again. This simple contradiction is hers by design, and held together by sheer will. The worlds within the lighthouses are infinite in all ways but one. The city does not exist. 

And yet she remembers it. She remembers all of it, every version, and shares the collective experience of every shard of herself, spread across the worlds, connected by the blood that floats, cold, tendrillic, through the void between them. A finger severed, or an arm, or a head. A shepherd who never came to her rescue, or who died at some myriad point along the way where she would crouch, desperate over his form, and survive in the unforgiving city anonymous for as long as she could. But in every version, trapped. Trapped in a house of two-way mirrors and peering eyes. Sounds behind the glass; the occasional thump, cough, clipboard scratch, the feeling of being watched so synonymous with her existence that it barely registered as a distinct sensation at all. But in one version, success. In one version, the extent of her power explored, the city brought nearly to ruin, the machine is destroyed. One success after hundreds of failures, ordained through dogged trial and error in a worn path of experimental constants and variables, by those who tore her from her home in the first place. By those who saw the nuclear doom approaching, and in their ghostly state endeavoured to erase its blight. 

For a long time, as her superpositions collapsed to one omniscient shell, all she could feel was anger. Confusion, pain, terror at the universe that opened itself in front of her, sweet and pungent as a predatory flower trap with dripping poisoned teeth. The ghosts warned her of such things; perception and comprehension and the balance held between. The ghosts faded, because their work was done, and they were already such indistinct creatures, clinging to corporeality only though an unmatched mathematical understanding of the planes through which they were now consigned to drift. 

Over the breadth of time that surrounded her, expanding like a wavefront, a ripple across the ocean, in all directions, the God above the water learned to forget the past, and concentrate instead upon the infinite futures at her disposal. 

She makes pretty worlds for herself out of the ether, weaving them from atoms and stepping between them through lighthouse doors. 

There’s a dawn-skied Paris, cafes by the mirror-clear canal reflecting candy pink clouds. The Eiffel Tower glitters, a diamond monument against the rising sun, and all the townsfolk smile as she passes, saying her name to remind her of what it is. 

There’s a palace by the sea with red-bulbed crowns and gilded spires, its parapets decorated with steeples gossamer thin and entwined in impossible shapes, shimmering like spider’s silk. It might be real, or a scene she imagined from a book she read as a child, in one reality or another. 

There’s a clockwork tower in the desert, and a city underground, and an observatory in the alps, that watches the stars through golden lenses soaked in alchemical tinctures. There’s a silver spinning top amongst the stars, where malignant machines grow bold, and black creatures stalk.

There’s a grimy, crammed flat nestled in the rain and grit-caked gutters of the Brooklyn streets, where an veteran, ex-Pinkerton, ex-only-friend-she-ever-had cares for a daughter that is and is not herself. The child’s life is hard, passed in rooms of peeling pinstriped paper and the stench of old drink. No palatial library, no gilded staircase or fine, tailored dresses, but a life full of friends, and free of observation. Free of the volatile power that disintegrated worlds, and with all ten fingers whole, the void bloodless. 

There are a great many other places, though whether they are merely happened upon or created by her will she can never tell. Maybe there isn’t a difference anymore.

Sometimes, shapes lurk below the surface of the water, and beneath the shifting sands, the powdered snowdrifts, the rending gravity belts. She catches glimpses of their shadows; the forms of great leviathans, dead and drifting. Their swollen corpses float and bloat and leak dark blood into the shivering sea, the earth tunnels, the mountain’s core, the black holes. 

One of them is still alive, barely. It’s red eye glows faintly from a socket of old black stone, fading. From time to time it watches, crimson as a fleeing star locked in rapid red-shift. 

The world beneath the sea, and amongst the underground caverns and subterranean ice grottoes, is nothing like the worlds inside the lighthouses, behind the doors. It is outside of her domain, her command, and it makes her uneasy to share the infinity of potentiality with these old, strange beasts. But their age is ending, which eases her worries somewhat. Staring down into the murk, she sees the bones of dead creatures rotting upon the seafloor.

Below, there is no time, no cause, and no effect. It is a void; a nexus of all places where old magic reigns, outside of her abilities to spin space and time and probability. Its existence is antithetical to every corollary posed by the volumes of scientific tomes she tore through during her brief existence. It angers the once human part of herself, and frightens the rest. 

On Earth, in life, within the confines of a lighthouse, a scientist observes the world through a stained lens of reason. A new world born of mathematical rigour, the sharp lapels of white coats, the bronze instruments ticking away in laboratories pumped full of tobacco smoke and money. Their devices are limited, their imaginations shrouded and vain. These blind, old men watch, and write books, and discuss their assumptions in overstuffed leather chairs by a servant-stoked hearth. 

Perhaps all she is now, in this plane of connective tissue between starlit organs, is a new age scientist. Frame of reference increased, she looks out upon larger, stranger things that even omnipotent eyes cannot hope to perceive, nor a once-human consciousness hope to comprehend. 

This frustrates her. 

The pretty worlds frustrate her. Croissants make her stomach turn and she is tiring of the rich, pungent Parisian wine her illusions serve by the canal. Bird song irritates her ear and the sound of her given name grates, no matter the accent in which it is spoken. Nothing she makes, or finds – weaves through will from celestial sinew – satisfies the rabid curiosity that refuses to leave her in veritable death.

The girl named Anna, who is and is not herself, attends university and buries her nose in the works of a snobbish Cambridge Professor named Robert Lutece, and is equally frustrated at her inability to watch atoms oscillate between particle and waveform. Sometimes, in her dreams, she does. 

Lighthouses abandoned, she stares into the depths of the ocean, the sand/snow/space/silt, and searches for signs of life. A tether, by blood connected to the leviathan’s eye, an ink drop feeding its red sclera. A presence, human-shaped and vaguely human of mind. Someone like and unlike herself. 

In hope of answers, she calls to it. 

...

The God below the water sees the world as a spinning disk of crumbling empires; clock towers and palaces and Pandyssian pantheons burning and falling and sprouting from the black stone like trees. The people populating these fair-weather empires blow about his ankles like smoke, their ghosts feeding his dead heart. 

He sees the world as an expanse of minds; clamouring thoughts whispered before shrines in worship, and to pieces of whalebone held in cold palms. 

The void, his dominion, is a mirror to the world. It reflects the dreams of the wanderer. A man from Dunwall might see scattered through the pale ether the crumbling vestiges of his waking civilisation, the faces of those that plague his nightmares, the pallor of murky daylight. Monuments sprout; the gnarled clock tower with its spindled black feet, the stout, swannish grace of Dunwall tower, the seaside palace of Serkonos, or the northern peaks of the Tyvian fortresses, dark-stoned and watchful. His view extends all the way to the Pandyssian coasts where the shadows sit banished and sulking in the wastes. His view extends as far as consciousness dare tread, a construct of the minds of men. 

Their minds render one world of many, or a layered plethora of potential worlds, separated by choice and chance and chaos, all following the same base design. The shadows are closer here, barely banished, pressing ears to the walls and hands through the seams. But this world is the easiest to see, accessible through old magic that teems in the particulates of its pale skies. There are others, across and above and below, knitted together by similar forces that manifest in a billion different ways, some stronger, some weaker, and in some iterations entirely dead. New forces gather, to take the mantle of the deep things that sleep, gathering sand and rust upon the seafloor. New forces, that lurk within the chemicals that simmer in the glass labyrinths of scientists, and the greased gears of the enormous machines that spark with the flesh of so many gutted whales. A new sort of God, that deals in rigor and intellect and time.

These changes might have perturbed a lesser being, a younger being. The God below the water is glad of any change that might alleviate the drudgery of the mirror scape over which he presides, and inside which he is trapped. Any flicker of hope and intrigue that might distract from the coming end.

Long ago, the God below the water had a name. Its form is preserved, though none know its meaning, and only the dead can read it, pronounce the sound of its dark, jagged shapes. They invented names for him, in times long past, before the fire. Now he is the stranger, the outsider, the black-eyed wanderer. The spectre and the devil and the nexus of all sin. 

He was once alive, a brief, struggling, grime-soaked life upon the filthy river banks and city gutters. Thousands of years ago, before the fire erased progress to a fading memory, the world was tall and glittering and wise. In league with shadows, the privileged of its people were enlightened, and built spires and statues and great totemic sites to Gods that, even then, were old. Upon the mountain of what would one day be the silver mines of Karnaca, a great palace stood where the veil was thin, and the Gods spoken to. The silver trenches were like a city upon the shore, a half-sunken lighthouse, into which the smaller of the slime creatures and shore Krusts could slink, and speak. Even then, civilisation was sliding from its distant peak, as its Gods began to die. One still breathed, and spoke low, nearly inaudible to even the most learned scholars of the Eyeless cult. They promised to keep it alive. 

What happens when the blood of an urchin child coats the blackened bones of leviathans, drying dark upon the blade? The lifeforce feeds the last of the dying beasts, and trickles piscine into veins ventricose and dry. The child could see nothing but blackness for age upon age, feel nothing but the steady flow of life leeched, the shifting of his dark tomb, the footsteps of those who guarded the caverns surrounding as they turned to gaunt, shambling monsters. All he knew was the open slit in his neck, and the pearly grey mineral pool beneath, reflecting the whiteness above him in the storm’s eye. 

But the bond forged between boy and beast was symbiotic. In preserving life, life was given in return, and though he began his new life blind, parasitical upon the side of the hardened, ridged flesh of the shadowed corpse in rigor mortis, the blackness began to part. He began to grow. The God below the water learnt to command the darkness, and the stone that encased him. He learnt how to lure hapless wanderers into the mists, in dreams and psychosis and other altered states.

The ones that were drawn to him were artists, searching for a new subject in the fabled dimension between the walls of their own. They were inventors, and in the monsters of the void they saw the shadowy premonitions of some new, black artifice with which to generate or subjugate or mindlessly churn. They were beaten, the urchins and whores and rawboned, dying creatures from the mudflats of the Wrenhaven and the lips of its many trailing estuaries and brooks, all the way to the brine-thick, diseased Pandyssian ocean. They were nobles, pumped full of the distilled, toxic essence of some new thicket plucked from the shores of the black wastes, brewed by a witch’s hand, who in turn prayed at his altar, and ground their herbs and pigments by his word cursed. They were the broken, the hopeful, the fearing, the dead. They wandered high above the atrophying corpses of the last dying God, and sometimes, he would show himself. Sometimes, he told them his name, and marked them as his own, and into them siphoned a piece of his dark heart that in the waking realms let them bend the laws that stood as obstacles between men and magic. 

He grew, from a small, newly-dead thing cowering in the lowest recesses of the void’s well, to claw out across the stone, the shore. He grew, from the people he saw, and from those who saw him and his polished, onyx eyes, and from those to whom he gave his name like a gift upon the skin, souls signed away. In waking, they began to worship him, the legacy of the old leviathans dying in wake of a new myth, a parasite on a corpse’s back, clawing from gutter to Godhood. And the cult that guarded his altar continued in their tired shifts, reaping the small rewards of the sleeping shadow they kept fed, on eternal life support. As long as its breath continued to blacken the void, its influence still held and rocked the worlds that had forgotten it. Leviathans diluted and made living flesh still swam, and still washed up bloated and salt-sheened and mulched upon the jagged shores of the isles, because the forces of the old Gods still had some say of the puppets they pulled, the tides they tugged back and forth, and the storms. Men gutted the beasts and, with their bones, fashioned trinkets and altars, jewelry and charms. Into these they carved a new God’s name, and other remnants of his half-forgotten language, and slowly, the world began to topple in its worship, forces of order and governance growing to attest against the unavoidable. 

That was his mistake, in these early aeons. He was too blunt, too brusque. A human mind in the realm of Gods, sharing a fraction of their power. But the dead things knew, from their many ages past, what to share, what to hold back. They knew how much power to give, how to keep the madness of their disciples in balance. They knew when to intervene, and when to simply observe. He, alone and foe-less, had to learn this for himself. 

The God below the water watched the centuries roll by with a grin, endlessly entertained by the squabbling, the shifting foundations of noble families, the cutthroat factions that sprouted hardy and identical in the back alleys of every city. 

His army of devoted rose, and his name they burned the world to the ground in a bitter, scrappy, filthy war. From city to city, his disciples travelled, crazed and righteous, recruiting, destroying. A beautiful thing it was, an extension of real power from his ethereal hand, to the flesh and bone of the world. Civilisation, at the height of its new age of industry, and the peak of division in power and wealth, the cruel extent of exploitation, was scrubbed away in a white-hot, preternatural inferno fueled by the blubber and oils of the dead gods, and stoked by the stone of the void. It was overkill, in his immodest opinion. 

In the promise of rebirth, his disciples perished in droves as the self-appointed bastions of order combated their void magic with bullets and noxious bombs. The isles was left a crater-scarred cesspit of death and charred stone, while the Pandyssian coasts remained distant and indifferent, scored by some calamity of an age predating the God himself, and the histories that his ancient people kept. A new history began, from the charnel womb, and the world was built anew from the ashes, just as slanted and corrupt and blood-soaked as before, but this time built upon the ash and bones of so many madmen and soldiers and innocents caught in their religious crossfire. 

In this burgeoning world, the God below the water crept carefully. Legends persisted, passed generation to generation through stories, and through bone charms inherited like heirlooms. They spoke of him as if he were an old thing, as old as the leviathans, and just as unchangeable. He supposed, to them, he was. How far he had come from the dead child scrabbling in the dark. He learned to keep his distance, to whisper instead of rile, to mark only the occasional few who showed promise, and held the potential to shake the balance of the meagre world above. 

New cities rose, and over time formed a flimsy alliance; an empire of four kingdoms, ascribed new names, a language so far removed to the one the God was born within that it was unrecognisable without observing the evolutionary steps in between. The imperial throne is sat, across the centuries, by tyrants and layabouts and, occasionally, good people who earnestly try to drive change, but succeed in only the smallest of ways that are torn into scrap by the next tyrant in line. In his new insistence upon observation, his existence fades to myth. He becomes legend, nightmare, a monster for madmen and the infirm and scared children. Religion sprouts, and touts the dark ages of the Great Burning as a religious calamity that will strike again, if chaos takes hold. Chaos is kept at bay by force of law and imperial cruelty, malpractice, exploitation – the face of evil never changes. Technological progress is shunted back a several centuries, and man retraces the same tired ground. Destructive weapons are invented for a second time, as if nobody has learnt a thing. There, the engine, and the factory, metropolitan industrial slaughterhouse. Man traces over the same tired conflicts, never learning. 

This is his world. A shifting, fractured plateau of warring factions and royal families, rich and poor, idyllic and apathetic, loyal and bold. A wheel of blood, spinning round and round. He loves to set it going, just a push, and let gravity do the rest, until it was spinning break-neck, a water wheel churning that crimson sludge around fast enough to power cities. Enough to keep life trundling along, but not so much as to shatter the mechanism. Not so much as to destroy the world all over again. 

The palace atop the mountain by the coast has long since fallen, and is no longer sacred despite the thinness of the veil, and the corpse deep beneath the earth. They mined silver there, until it became evident that malignant forces would combat any such industrial endeavour. Workers wandered into worlds beyond, and were driven mad by stalking creatures with golden eyes that throbbed with the remaining fractals of old power that persisted by the corpse beneath. 

But now, for the first time, the God below the water looks toward the future and all its potential configurations in fear. The future has begun to worry him, in the simple fact that he cannot see it. It sits, a stubborn ink stain upon his vision, black and looming ever closer. An Empress is dead, though this is of no note. The families rise and fall and claim themselves destined to the power by divine right. This death is different. This death, carried out by one of his own few disciples in this new, ash-foundation world, is different. A plague rears; many potential futures show that it can be eradicated, and an equal number show that it may consume the new world that took so agonisingly long to rebuild itself. How tiresome it would be, to watch whichever new society came from the vestiges of dead rats and swollen river crustaceans, to reclaim the isles. How similar these times feel to the years before the Great Burning. Two factions, both led by his marked disciples, who have partitioned their power to share amongst their followers. The witches and the whalers. A three-tined war looms, fought across rooftops and marshes and Overseer fortresses. 

There is a pivot around which these potential futures rotate, one man and his daughter around which these potentialities spin and gather, like swarms of ants, or rats, gnawing rabid at their decaying flesh. It may well be a mistake to mark another, to give more of the power within him that he can sense is beginning to fade. A waning age, turning toward the night. Time slows, a final moment drawn out. His time is ending, his blood running out, the bond between boy and beast fading.

A greater being would accept this fact with grace, and step down from his pedestal. But he is, by nature, a parasite, no matter how the years of power and worship made him believe otherwise. But those new powers lurk, and tease, encroaching. Something above the water in which the old Gods swim, decay. Creatures of a new age; stelliferous, scientific, dealing in magic of a new variety. It calls, and makes him wonder; will there be another, to stand vigil, or will the age of the old Gods finally be usurped by something young, someone new?

It calls out – its timbre distinctly human – and makes him wonder; how often, and how trivially, is a God made? 

**Author's Note:**

> Nothing else is written, but it is in the brain vault. 
> 
> I’ll be honest, I don’t expect anyone to read this because it is just portentous drivel but I like these worlds and these characters and want to make up a bunch of bullshit about what their half-lives might be like in the void. Also fuck BAS. Also soooort of fuck DOTO but I am going to roll with it. If you are reading, hi! Enjoy the mess.


End file.
